Chocolate Nilgiri Black Tea

The latest victim of PostDanmark’s incompetence has been located and delivered to my door within half an hour of them calling me to tell me and get my street address. So obviously they’re not completely useless, but I’m still not feeling all that inclined towards trust at the moment.

Receiving it was exciting partly because it had actually been found (which I hadn’t been 100% convinced that it would) and partly because I simply got taken in by the awesome deal Chi of Tea offered on that day to the point where today I only had a vague recollection of what I had actually bought.

I made sure to make everything ready to brew a cup, pot ready for the insertion of leaves, kettle filled with water to be turned on when the package was here and opened and clean cup with strainer placed on top. All I had to do when it got here was choose one.

So I picked this one. The dry leaf smelled a lot of dark chocolate. Sweet and chocolate-y, not dry cocoa which some brands tend to think would be the same thing. It’s the same thing after steeping, only now the aroma of the tea is also shining through. It’s a warm, red smell with a strong malty note to it. I haven’t paid attention to that note before in other flavoured Nilgiris, but it does remind me somewhat of a sort of mixture between generic Ceylons and the Tan Yang Te Ji from TeaSpring that I like. One of these days I really ought to go hunting for a plain Nilgiri. It’s just not a very common type around these parts.

The flavour is… hard to describe, actually. I’m getting a lot of a sort of nutty note and a sort of wooden note that I also generally see a lot of in the Tan Yang. I’m not really picking up a lot of chocolate, though. I like it when a flavoured tea is subtle in it’s flavouring. When you drink some tea and the flavouring pops up on the swallow and the aftertaste. As a sort of extra feature rather than running the whole show. But I’m not even really getting that. It’s possible that I’ve managed to make it too strong, that somehow this particular tea doesn’t tolerate as much abuse as other flavoured blacks, but all I’m really getting here is tea. An interesting one, yes, but I was expecting a little more than that.

After several sips, my mouth feels like I’ve eaten a ton of nuts, and only now at the back of my throat am I beginning to detect some chocolate. It’s not really an aftertaste of chocolate, it’s more like an aftertaste of the idea of chocolate. I’m sorry, but that’s just wee bit too subtle.

I’ll have to experiment with it a little and based on that I might add or take away some points, but this is where I’m landing on the first go. This is not in the running for perfect chocolate tea. (In fact, so far my local shop is just about the only place I’ve found a chocolate flavoured black that hit all my right spots. We have it at work.)

I’m really gutted as this was my first chocolate tea, I’ve never tried chocolate tea but I don’t think that this is how chocolate tea tastes.. I can’t taste the chocolate! I must try a new chocolate tea.

I haven’t had this for a while, but I remembered that I wanted to try it with cooler water and a shorter steep time, so I settled on 190 degrees and 3.30 mins. It still had a sort of unpleasant bitterness to it, so I added a little sugar but that just made it a little sickly. I didn’t really enjoy this at all today, especially the sugar, so I am knocking the score down from 73.

Unfortunately this tea scalded my right side and arm last night when my cat decided his catnip toy must be on the ledge of the bathtub where this was resting as I soaked. But, I was able to move beyond that after the pain subsided and pour another cup. This was really nice. The Nilgiri is lovely though I didn’t get a very strong chocolate flavour; if I hadn’t known it was supposed to be there I probably wouldn’t have guessed it. But it made a bold but smooth and enjoyable cup.